by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, William Cran,
The making of English is the story of three invasions and a cultural
revolution. In the simplest terms, the language was brought to Britain by
Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, influenced by Latin and Greek
when St Augustine and his followers converted England to Christianity, subtly
enriched by the Danes, and finally transformed by the French‑speaking Normans.
From the beginning, English was a crafty hybrid, made in war and
peace. It was, in the words of Daniel Defoe, 'your Roman‑Saxon‑Danish‑Norman
English'. In the course of one thousand years, a series of violent and dramatic
events created a new language which, by the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, was
intelligible to modern eyes and ears without the aid of subtitles.
The English have always accepted the mixed blood of their language.
There was a vague understanding that they were part of a European language
family, but it was not until the eighteenth century that a careful investigation
by a gifted amateur linguist began to decipher the true extent of this common
heritage.
In the early days of the Raj, Sir William Jones, a British judge stationed in India,
presented a remarkable address to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta, the fruits
of his investigations into ancient Sanskrit. A keen lawyer, Jones had originally
intended to familiarize himself with India's native law codes. To his surprise,
he discovered that Sanskrit bore a striking resemblance to two other ancient
languages of his acquaintance, Latin and Greek. The Sanskrit word for father,
transliterated from its exotic alphabet, emerged as pitar, astonishingly
similar, he observed, to the Greek and Latin pater. The Sanskrit for
mother was matar; in the Latin of his school days it was mater. Investigating
further, he discovered dozens of similar correspondences. Though he was not
the first to notice these similarities, no one before Sir William Jones had
studied them systematically. The Sanskrit language, he announced to the Asiatick
Society on that evening of 2 February 1786, shared with Greek and Latin a
stronger affinity ... than could possibly have been produced by accident;
so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without
believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no
longer exists'.
Two centuries of linguistic research have only strengthened Jones's
basic proposition. We now know that the languages of about one‑third of the
human race come from this Indo‑European 'common source'. These include the
European descendants of Latin, French, and Spanish, a great Slavic language,
Russian, the Celtic languages, Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the offshoots
of German ‑ Dutch and English. A second important breakthrough in the search
for the truth about 'the common source' came from the folklorist Jakob Grimm,
better known, with his brother Wilhelm, as a collector of fairy‑tales. 'Grimm's
Law' established the important connection between a p in Latin
(piscis) and an f in English (fish). Thus the German
vater (and English father) has the same root as the Sanskrit/Latin
pitar/pater. Words such as me, new, seven and mother
were also found to share this common ancestry. Now the Indo‑European basis
for the common source was clear.
It is sometimes said that you can deduce the history of a people
from the words they use. Clever detective work among some fifty prehistoric
vocabularies has now led to a reconstruction of the lifestyle of a vanished
people, the first Indo‑European tribes, the distant forebears of contemporary
Europe. From the words they used ‑ words for winter and horse ‑ it seems
likely that the Indo‑Europeans lived a half‑settled, half‑nomadic existence.
They had domestic animals ‑ oxen, pigs, and sheep ‑ they worked leather and
wove wool, ploughed the land, and planted grain. They had an established
social and family structure, and they worshipped gods who are the clear ancestors
of Indian, Mediterranean, and Celtic deities.
Who these people were, and when exactly they lived, is a hotly
disputed mystery. According to the Garden of Eden myth, they lived in the
fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, but this theory was exploded by nineteenth‑century
archaeology. Today, there are some who argue for the Kurgan culture of the
Russian steppes, others for the farming culture of the Danube valley. The
dates vary from 6000 BC to 4500 BC. The most widely accepted theory locates
the environment of the Indo‑Europeans in a cold, northern climate in which
common words for snow, beech, bee, and wolf played an important
role. Furthermore, none of these prehistoric languages has a word for the
sea that we can find. From this, and from our knowledge of nature, it is
clear that the Indo‑Europeans must have lived inland somewhere just north
of the Black Sea.
Two innovations contributed to the break‑up of this Central European
society: the horse and the wheel. Some of the Indo‑Europeans began to travel
east and, in the course of time, established the Indo‑Iranian languages of
the Caucasus, India, Pakistan, and Assam. Others began to drift west towards
the gentler climates of Europe. Their descendants are found in Greece, Italy,
Germany, and the Baltic. Both the Rhine and the Rhone are thought to take
their names from the Indo‑European word meaning flow. English has
much in common with all these languages. A word like hrother has an
obvious family resemblance to its Indo‑European cousins: broeder (Dutch),
Bruder (German), phrater (Greek), brat (Russian), bráthairbhratar
(Sanskrit). (Irish), and
One of the earliest westward migrations was made by a people whose
descendants now live in Cornwall, the highlands of Scotland, Ireland, Wales,
and Brittany: the Celts. These Gaelic‑speaking tribes were natives of the
British Isles long before the English. Today, the people of Wales prefer
to call themselves cymry, or 'fellow‑countrymen', a reminder that
they ‑ together with the Irish, Scots and Cornish ‑ are the true Britons.
The language of Wales ‑ Cymraeg ‑ is part of a Celtic family
stretching north to the islands of the Hebrides and south to the remoter
parts of Britanny. Welsh and Breton, in fact, are very closely related, and
the traditional Breton‑French onion sellers who used to bicycle through the
valleys of Wales every summer were able to communicate with their Welsh‑speaking
customers.
The Welsh have remained as fiercely independent (1282 Wales was
conquered under Edward I, whose son became Prince of Wales) in words as in
deed. The Cambrian mountains, the mountain range that gave the fleeing Britons
a refuge from the conquering Anglo‑Saxons, isolated the Welsh language from
outside influence for centuries. Some attribute the resilience of the language
to the translation of the Bible from English into Welsh by William Morgan
in 1588. Even at the beginning of the industrial revolution, in which the
coal mines of Wales were to play such a vital part, the vast majority of
the people still spoke Welsh. In the great social and economic upheavals
of Victorian Britain there were some who believed that Welsh culture was
being irreparably threatened and they fled to Patagonia. In retrospect, they
were unduly alarmist. Despite the anglicizing inroads of intermarriage, education,
and industrialization, the persistence of Welsh language and culture is remarkable.
At the turn of the century, two‑thirds of the Welsh were bilingual, and according
to a recent census, some 527,600 (or some 20 per cent) still claim to be
Welsh speakers.
Today, Welsh language and culture flourish. The language is used
in education, and it has theoretical equality with English in law and administration.
Welsh nationalists have successfully campaigned ‑ like the Quebec separatists
‑ for bilingual road signs. The Welsh‑language television station, S4C, is
popular and successful. The annual Eisteddfod
(first held at Cardigan Castle in 1176) keeps alive an idea of culture that
goes back to the days when the Welsh enjoyed sovereignty of the island called
Britannia. The strength of this Welsh culture has permeated the English spoken
in Wales. Eluned Phillips, winner of the Eisteddfod Crown, believes that
Welsh‑English speakers can always be identified by the lilt of their speech.
She remarks that even with Richard Burton, who spoke almost perfect Standard
English, his Welsh roots were recognizable in 'the melodious lilt of his
voice and the sing‑song way he used to talk English, the resonance, the rounded
vowels ‑ in the music of the language'.
The Welshness of the English spoken in Wales also appears in sentence
construction. According to Eluned Phillips:
In Welsh we tend to invert
our sentences, perhaps putting the adjective after the noun ... I was talking
to a neighbour the other day. She is from the valleys and we were talking
about a young Welshman who had died. What she said to me was, 'Pity it was
that he died so early', which is really a literal translation of the Welsh
... We also have a habit of using throwaway words ‑ like, indeed, look
you ‑ and I think this originally started because we couldn't finish
the translation from Welsh in time. So a word like 'indeed' became an important
stop‑gap.
The Welsh contribution to English literature is also distinctive,
and Eluned Phillips believes that this, too, has deep Celtic roots. 'You
can always tell when a Welshman is writing in English because of the flamboyance
of the descriptions. I think that comes down from the old Celtic warriors
who used to go into battle (against the Anglo‑Saxons) not only with terror
in their veins, but with red hot waves of ecstasy.'
The Celtic Britons had the misfortune to inhabit an island that
was highly desirable both for its agriculture and for its minerals. The early
history of Britain is the story of successive invasions. One of the most
famous was the landing of Julius Caesar and his legions in 55 BC. After a
difficult start, the Roman Empire kept the British tribes in check ‑ or at
any rate at bay ‑ beyond Hadrian's
Wall. The evidence of the splendid palace at Fishbourne, near Chichester,
suggests that many Celtic Britons became quite Romanized. The poet Martial
claimed, with the boastfulness of poets, that his work was read even in the
remote island of Britannia. A few Roman words crept, corrupted, into British
usage: place‑names like Chester, Manchester, and Winchester, are derived
from the Roman word castra, meaning a camp. Once the legions withdrew (traditionally
in AD 410) and the Empire collapsed, this achievement was threatened. Along
the shores of Europe, a new generation of raiders was turning its attention
to the misty, fertile island across the water.
The tribes which now threatened the Celtic chiefs of Britain were
essentially Germanic, another branch of the Indo‑European migration. After
the Celts, the movement of the Germanic
people into the Baltic region, Northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands
produced two more massive branches in the great language tree of Europe.
To the north, there were the Norse tongues of Scandinavia; to the south,
the family of West Germanic languages. This second branch divided into the
High German and the Low German. The first serious historian
of these Germans was the Roman writer Tacitus, who gives us the earliest
picture of the tribes that became the first Englishmen.
Tacitus was writing near the
zenith of the Roman Empire. The armies of Rome were garrisoned across Europe
from Britannia to Bucharest, throughout the known world. There was an obvious
fascination with the unruly peoples of the North, especially the troublesome
ones like the Germans. In his Germania, 'On the Origin and Geography
of Germany', Tacitus makes a colourful evaluation of the character and customs
of the tribes that absorbed so much of Rome's political and military power.
The Germans, he says, have the virtues Rome has lost. They love freedom;
their women are chaste; there is no public extravagance. He characterizes
the various tribes. The Tencteri excel in horsemanship, the Chatti have 'hardy
bodies, well‑knit limbs and fierce countenances', the Suebi tie their hair
in a knot, and so on. But no picture is perfect. There are, Tacitus writes,
seven tribes about whom there is 'nothing particularly noteworthy' to say,
except that they worship the goddess Mother Earth, 'a ceremony performed
by slaves who are immediately afterwards drowned in the lake'. One of these
seven barbarous tribes was 'the Anglii', known to history as the Angles, who
probably inhabited the area that is now known as Schleswig‑Holstein.
By a curious irony, the savage and primitive rituals of the Anglii
have not been entirely forgotten. Peat‑water has a curious property. In the
nineteenth century, Danish farmers, digging for peat, uncovered the bodies
of some sacrificial victims, presumably of the Angles, perfectly preserved
in a bog. Known as the Moorleichen (swamp corpses), or bog people,
they are now on view in a number of Danish museums. One man had been strangled.
Another's throat had been cut. They are astonishingly well preserved: you
can see the stubble on one man's chin. These leathery corpses are the distant
ancestors of the English‑speaking peoples.
The speech of the Anglii belonged to the Germanic family of languages.
Further south, probably living among the marshy islands of coastal Holland,
were the Frisii (Frisians), a raiding people whose descendants still live
and farm in the area known as Frisia or Friesland, and speak a language that
gives us the best clue to the sound of Anglo‑Saxon English. Most people would
probably associate Frisia with cows. It is an identification the native Frisians
seem proud of. In the central square of the main town, Leeuwarden, where
you might expect to find an equestrian memorial to a local hero, there is
a larger‑than‑life statue of a milk‑laden cow. Today there are about 300,000
Frisian speakers who travel up and down the dykes and canals, working the
flat, marshy land much as their ancestors have done for centuries. The Frisian
for cow, lamb, goose, boat, dung, and rain is ko, lam, goes, boat, dong
and rein. And the Frisian for 'a cup of coffee' is in kopke kofie.
The similarity between Frisian and English, both with strong Germanic
roots, emphasizes how close English is to German, Dutch and Danish. The Germanic
echoes in all these languages betray their oldest and deepest roots. And
it is no accident that the Dutch, for instance, often seem to speak English
with as much ease as the English themselves. The evidence of a place like
Friesland suggests that if that linguistic cataclysm, the Norman Conquest
of 1066, had not occurred, the English today might speak a language not unlike
modern Dutch.
According to their own record of events, The Anglo‑Saxon Chronicle (begun by Alfred,
ended in 1154), the first invaders of the British Isles ‑ the Angles, Saxons
and Jutes ‑ sailed across the North Sea from Denmark and the coastal part
of Germany, still known as Lower Saxony, in the year AD 449. By all accounts,
they had lost none of their taste for terror and violence. 'Never,' wrote
the chronicler, 'was there such slaughter in this Island.' The native Britons
were driven westward, fleeing from the English as from fire'. The English
language arrived in Britain on the point of a sword.
The process of driving the British into what is now called the
'Celtic fringe' did not happen overnight. The most successful resistance
was organized by a dux bellorum (as Nennius called him) named Artorius ‑
probably the legendary King Arthur ‑ who managed to establish an uneasy peace
for perhaps a generation. In the long run, though, the Anglo‑Saxons ‑ 'proud
warmakers, victorious warriors' ‑ were unbeatable. They put the Britons to
flight at places like Searoburgh (Old Sarum) and elsewhere, occupied old
Romano‑British settlements like Camulodunum (Colchester) and Verulamium (St
Albans), and strengthened their control over some of the most fertile parts
of the islands. In the course of the next 150 years they set up seven kingdoms
(Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex) in an
area which roughly corresponds to present‑day England. They called the dispossessed
Britons wealas, meaning 'foreigners', from which we get the word Welsh.
The extent to which the Anglo‑Saxons overwhelmed the native Britons
is illustrated in their vocabulary. We might expect that two languages ‑
and especially a borrowing language like English ‑ living alongside each
other for several centuries would borrow freely from each other. In fact,
Old English (the name scholars give to the English of the Anglo‑Saxons) contains
barely a dozen Celtic words. Three of these, significantly, refer to features
of the British landscape that the English could not have known in their flat,
marshy continental homelands: crag, tor (a high rock) and combe
(a deep valley, as in High Wycombe). Another likely borrowing is puca,
an evil spirit, who eventually turns up as Puck, Shakespeare's mischiefmaker.
Place‑names tell a similar story. Some modern river names are Celtic,
not English (Avon means 'river'), and some towns have Roman‑British names:
Londinium became London ‑ the Old Irish lond means 'wild'.
Lindum Colonia became Lincoln, partly derived from the Welsh Ilyn,
meaning 'lake'. Dubris ‑ also dwfr for 'water' in Welsh ‑ became
Dover. But most English place‑names are English or Danish. When, for instance,
the English settled among the ruins of Isurium they called their town
Aldborough, which means simply Old Town. One or two place‑names give
a vivid indication of the mutual antipathy, the yawning communication gap,
that existed between the two sides. Cheetwood in Lancashire is a tautology.
Cheet is an old Celtic word for 'wood'. It is as though the English
could not be bothered to learn the language of the island they had conquered.
Again, in Buckinghamshire, there's a place called Brill, which comes
from Bre‑Hill. Yet bre is the Celtic for 'hill'. Whoever named the
place in Old English obviously did not understand even the most common words
of the native language. This is a pattern we shall find repeated again when
the English language travelled to North America and Australia.
The hostility went both ways. A fragment of an early Welsh folk
song tells of a young man going 'with a heart like lead' to live in 'the
land of the Saxons'. To this day the gap between the English on the one hand
and the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish on the other, is often huge. The Welsh
campaign for bilingualism; the Scots proudly retain separate legal and education
systems and frequently despise the Sassenachs, a Scots Gaelic version
of 'Saxons'; and the Irish have been at war with the people they now, ironically,
call 'the Brits' on and off for nearly eight centuries. On the face of it,
the English language has been indifferent to the Celts and their influence.
Yet the lyrical spirit of the Celts imbues English literature and speech
from the earliest ballads to the present day. In the way that some of the
greatest Roman poets came from the provinces, many of the finest writers
in English ‑ for example, Swift, Burns, Burke, Scott, Stevenson, Wilde, Shaw,
and Dylan Thomas ‑ are of Celtic origin. English speakers have a huge debt
to the poetic mind of the Celts, and it was the scattered people of Scotland,
Ireland, and Wales who took the English language on many of the world journeys
we shall be describing.
To the Celts, their German conquerors were all Saxons, but gradually
the terms Anglii and Anglia crept into the language, also referring
to the invaders generally. About 150 years after the first raids, King Aethelbert
of Kent was styled rex Anglorum by Pope Gregory. A century later the
Venerable Bede, writing in Latin, composed a history of what he called 'The
English church and people'. In the vernacular, the people were Angelcynn
(Angle‑kin) and their language was Englisc. By AD 1000, the country
was generally known as Englaland, the land of the Angles.
Gradually, the Anglo‑Saxons settled down and began farming their
new property. They were an agricultural people. Their art is full of farming,
and so is their vocabulary. Everyday words like sheep, shepherd, ox, earth,
plough, swine, dog, wood, field, and work all come from Old English.
After the hard struggle of daily life in the fields, they loved to celebrate,
from which come words like glee, laughter, and mirth. Not all
the words have the same meaning now. Mirth used to mean 'enjoyment',
or 'happiness' and even 'religious joy'. Merry, as in Merry Christmas
or Merry England, could mean no more than 'agreeable' or 'pleasing'.
It is impossible ‑ unless you go in for tortuous circumlocution
‑ to write a modern English sentence without using a feast of Anglo‑Saxon
words. Computer analysis of the language has shown that the 100 most common
words in English are all of Anglo‑Saxon origin. The basic building‑blocks
of an English sentence ‑ the, is, you, and so on ‑ are Anglo‑Saxon.
Some Old English words, like mann, hus, and drincan, hardly
need translation. Equally, a large part of the Anglo‑Saxon lexicon ‑ for
example, a word like tungdwitega meaning 'an astrologer' ‑ is, to
us, totally incomprehensible. These roots are important. Anyone who speaks
or writes English in the late twentieth century is using accents, words,
and grammar which, with several dramatic modifications, go all the way back
to the Old English of the Anglo‑Saxons. There is an unbroken continuity from
here to there (both Old English words). When, in 1940, Winston
Churchill wished to appeal to the hearts and minds of the English‑speaking
people it is probably no accident that he did so with the plain bareness
for which Old English is noted: 'We shall fight on the beaches; we shall
fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.' In this celebrated
passage, only surrender is foreign ‑ Norman‑French.
Old English was not a uniform language. From the beginning it had its own local varieties,
just as today, on a much larger scale, the English of California differs
from the English of Auckland or of London. The regions of Old English correspond
with surprising accuracy to the main varieties of contemporary spoken English
in the British Isles. When a Geordie from Newcastle pronounces a word like
path with a short a, or a farmer in Hardy country, in Dorchester
for example, burrs his rs, the pronunciation is a heavily modified
throwback to the local English speech of Anglo‑Saxon times. Even the ancient
kingdom of Kent, conquered by the Jutes from Jutland, still has a distinct
speech‑pattern whose origins can be traced back to that first invasion.
The Anglo‑Saxons, by all accounts, were very sophisticated in the
arts of speech. Theirs was, after all, an oral culture. In the late twentieth
century, we work on paper, relying on typewriters, word processors, and Xerox
machines. If we make an agreement, we insist on seeing it in 'black and white'.
But most Anglo‑Saxons would have been unable to read or write ‑ they had
to rely on speech and memory. Their oral tradition was highly developed;
they enjoyed expressing their ideas in an original, often rather subtle way.
They valued understatement, and liked riddles, and poems which went in circles.
These preferences suggest a certain deviousness about them, although they
also liked to cultivate an air of plain bareness, which is not an unknown
art even today.
The Anglo‑Saxon love of ambiguity, innuendo, and word‑play, which
remains a distinguishing characteristic of the English language to this day,
can be seen very clearly in the collection of Old English verse known as
The Exeter Book of Riddles. Riddle 69 is simply one line: 'On the
way a miracle: water become bone.' This is ice. Riddle 45 is ostensibly about
dough:
I'm told a certain object grows
in the corner, rises and expands,
throws up
a crust. A proud wife carried
off
that boneless wonder, the daughter
of a King
covered that swollen thing with a cloth.
The same love of intricacy and interlacing is obvious in the visual
art of the Anglo‑Saxons, in their jewellery and their manuscripts. The jewellery
discovered by archaeologists excavating the ship‑burial of an Anglo‑Saxon
king at Sutton Hoo shows a mastery of geometric pattern, and provides the
visual counterpart to the complicated minds of the first English poets. It
is easy to overlook the cultural difficulties facing the Anglo‑Saxons. By
Roman standards, they did not have a very developed society. But they had
lived more or less outside the pale of the Roman Empire and had no experience
of 'civilization'. Everything had to be done for the first time ‑ it was
a process of trial and error. Historically, the Anglo‑Saxons have had a rather
mixed press; but they deserve great credit for the energy and determination
with which they developed their own sense of culture.
The civilizing energies of the Anglo‑Saxons received an enormous
boost when Christianity brought its huge Latin vocabulary to England in the
year AD 597. The remarkable impact of Christianity is reported by the Venerable Bede
in a story which says as much about the collision of Old English and Latin
as it does about the spread of God's word. According to the famous tradition,
the mission of St Augustine was inspired by the man who was later to become
Pope Gregory the Great. Walking one morning in the market‑place of Rome,
he came upon some fair‑haired boys about to be sold as slaves. He was told
they came from the island of Britain and were pagans. What a pity,' he said,
'that the author of darkness is possessed of men of such fair countenances.'
What was the name of their country? he asked. He was told that they were
called Angles (Anglii). 'Right,' he replied, 'for they have an angelic
face, and it is fitting that such should be co‑heirs with the angels in heaven.
What is the name,' he continued, 'of the province from which they are brought?'
He was told that they were natives of a province called Deira. 'Truly are
they de ira,' is the way Bede expresses the future pope's reply, 'plucked
from wrath and called to the memory of Christ. How is the king of that province
called?' They told him his name was Aella. Gregory, who appears to have had
an incorrigible taste for puns, said, 'Alleluia, the praise of God the Creator
must be sung in those parts.' Bede says that Gregory intended to undertake
the mission to Britain himself, but in the end he sent Augustine and a party
of about fifty monks to what must have seemed like the end of the earth.
Augustine and his followers would have been aware that the tribes
they were setting out to convert were notoriously savage. The risk must have
seemed almost suicidal. But fortune smiled. Augustine and his monks landed
in Kent, a small kingdom which, happily for them, already had a small Christian
community. The story of the great missionary's arrival at the court of King
Aethelbert is memorably reported by Bede:
When, at the king's command, they had sat down and preached the word of life to the king and his court, the king said: 'Your words and promises are fair indeed; they are new and uncertain, and I cannot accept them and abandon the age‑old beliefs that I have held together with the whole English nation. But since you have travelled far, and I can see that you are sincere in your desire to impart to us what you believe to he true and excellent, we will not harm you. We will receive you hospitably and take care to supply you with all that you need; nor will we forbid you to preach and win any people you can to your religion.'
After this, perhaps the earliest recorded example of English tolerance,
the liberal‑minded king arranged for Augustine to have a house in Canterbury,
the capital of his tiny kingdom. He kept his word: Augustine's mission went
ahead unhindered.
The conversion of England to Christianity was a gradual process,
but a peaceful one. No one was martyred. The mission received a boost in
AD 635 when Aidan, a charismatic preacher from the Celtic church in Ireland,
independently began the conversion of the north. The twin sources of English
Christianity are reflected in the two Old English words for its central symbol,
the cross. In the north there was the Irish version, cros. Down south
an earlier, German borrowing, also derived from the Latin crux, produced
cruc. Cruc has vanished from the language, though there is
a Crutched Friars Street (friars with crosses) in London to this day.
With the establishment of Christianity came the building of churches
and monasteries, the corner‑stones of Anglo‑Saxon culture, providing education
in a wide range of subjects. Bede, himself a pupil at the monastery in Jarrow,
writes that not only were the great monk‑teachers learned in sacred and profane
literature', they also taught poetry, astronomy, and arithmetic. The new
monasteries also encouraged writing in the vernacular, and all the plastic
arts. Astonishing work in stone and glass, rich embroidery, magnificent illuminated
manuscripts, were all fostered by the monks, as were church music and architecture.
The importance of this cultural revolution in the story of the
English language is not merely that it strengthened and enriched Old English
with new words, more than 400 of which survive to this day, but also that
it gave English the capacity to express abstract thought. Before the coming
of St Augustine, it was easy to express the common experience of life ‑ sun
and moon, hand and heart, sea and land, heat and cold ‑ in Old English, but
much harder to express more subtle ideas without resort to rather elaborate,
German‑style portmanteaux like frumweorc (fruma, beginning,
and weorc, work = creation). Now, there were Greek and Latin words
like angel, disciple, litany, martyr, mass, relic, shrift, shrine,
and psalm ready to perform quite sophisticated functions. The conversion
of England changed the language in three obvious ways: it gave us a large
church vocabulary; it introduced words and ideas ultimately from as far away
as India and China; and it stimulated the Anglo‑Saxons to apply existing words
to new concepts.
Church words came from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Disciple, shrine,
preost, hiscop, nonne, and munuc (monk) all have Latin origins.
Apostle, pope, and psalter are borrowed, via the Scriptures,
from Greek. Sabbath comes from Hebrew. Angelos (messenger)
and diabolos (slanderer) were transformed into angel and devil,
central figures in the Madame Tussaud's of early Christianity. Easter
is a curiosity: the word preserves the name of Eostre, the pagan goddess
of dawn. To understand the speed and completeness with which the language
of the Bible was absorbed into Old English, we have only to think of the
way in which our own contemporary vocabulary has become permeated by the language
of psychology and psychoanalysis with words like ego, id, angst, and
subconscious.
The oriental origins of the Christian faith introduced words from
the Bible ‑ camel, lion, cedar, myrrh ‑ which must have seemed as
exotic and strange to a seventh‑century Englishman as, say, recent borrowings
from Japanese culture like kamikaze and ju‑jitsu did at first.
Also from the East came exotic words like orange and pepper, the names
India and Saracen, and phoenix, the legendary bird.
Oyster and mussel are both Mediterranean borrowings, while
ginger comes ultimately from Sanskrit.
Perhaps most interesting of all is the way Old English reinvented
and rejuvenated itself in the face of this Latin cornucopia by giving old
words new meanings. God, heaven, and hell are all Old English
words which, with the arrival of Christianity, became charged with a deeper
significance. The Latin spiritus sanctus, or Holy Spirit, became translated
as Halig Gast (Holy Ghost), feond (fiend) was used as a synonym
for Devil, and Judgement Day became, in Old English, Doomsday. The
Latin evangelium (good news) became the English god‑spell, which
gives us gospel. To this day, the power of the English language to
express the same thought or object in either an early vernacular or a more
elaborate Latinate style is one of its most remarkable characteristics, and
one which enables it to have a unique subtlety and flexibility of meaning.
By the end of the eighth century, the impact of Christianity on Anglo‑Saxon England had produced
a culture unrivalled in Europe. The illuminated manuscripts of the famous
monastery at Lindisfarne, on Holy Island off the Northumbrian coast, show
how words and pictures had both achieved a kind of perfection. But in the
eighth and ninth centuries this culture faced another threat from what was
to become the second great influence on the making of English ‑ the sea‑warriors
from the North.
The mass movement of the Scandinavian
peoples between the years AD 750 and 1050, one of the great migrations of European history, began as plunder‑raids
and ended as conquest and settlement. People from what is now known as Sweden
established a kingdom in part of European Russia. Adventurers from Norway
colonized parts of the British Isles, the Faroes, and Iceland, pushed on
to Greenland and eventually the coast of Labrador. And the Danes ‑ also called
Norsemen ‑ conquered northern France (which became Normandy) and finally
England. Collectively, these peoples are referred to as the Vikings, a name
which is thought to come either from the Norse vik (a bay, indicating
'one who frequents inlets of the sea') or from the Old English wic,
a camp, the formation of temporary encampments being a prominent feature
of Viking raids. In the past, the Vikings have been described as daring pirates
but, while there is obviously much truth to the stereotype, recent scholarship
likes to emphasize the long‑term peaceful benefits of the Norse landings.
It has been suggested, too, that the native Anglo‑Saxons took advantage of
the Viking raids to settle old scores with each other. Unlike the Anglo‑Saxon
race war against the Celts, which preserved virtually no trace of the Celtic
languages in English, the Danish settlers had a profound influence on the
development of Old English.
The Viking raids against England began in earnest in the year AD
793 when the monasteries of Jarrow and Lindisfarne were sacked in successive
seasons and plundered of gold and silver. By the middle of the ninth century
almost half the country was in Viking hands. The Norsemen, referred to by
the Anglo‑Saxons as 'Danes', turned their forces against the jewel in the
crown: the kingdom of Wessex.
The king of Wessex was a young man named Alfred, (Alfred "the Great") who had
inherited the throne in 871 after his brother was killed beating off the
first of the Danish attacks from the north. It is perhaps a measure both
of Alfred's qualities and of the desperate situation in Wessex that Alfred
was chosen in preference to his brother's sons. For a time, the Vikings seemed
unstoppable. By 878 Alfred was reduced to taking refuge with a small band
of followers in the marshes of Somerset on the island of Athelney. The story
of Alfred burning the cakes while brooding on the plight of his kingdom symbolizes
the gravity of his situation. This was the moment at which it became suddenly
possible that English might be wiped out altogether. With no English‑speaking
kingdoms left, the country would gradually speak Norse. The turning‑point
came that same year. Alfred raised a fresh army of men from Somerset, Wiltshire,
and Hampshire, and, surprising the Danes, overwhelmed them at the battle
of Ethandune, a victory commemorated by a white horse carved on the hillside.
The subsequent Treaty of Wedmore saved Wessex. The Danes withdrew
to the north. Alfred and the English‑speaking Saxons ruled in the south and
the country was partitioned roughly along the line of Watling Street, the
old Roman road that ran from London to Chester. Having won the war, Alfred
set out to make sure he won the peace. His problem was that his power‑base
was too small to guarantee that the peace with the Danes would hold, or that
Englishmen living outside Wessex in, for example, Mercia (Worcestershire
and Warwickshire) would not be gradually drawn into the Danish empire.
As king of Wessex Alfred had sovereignty only over people who lived
in the counties of the south‑west centred on Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset,
and Hampshire, based around the capital city, Winchester. He had no power
over, for example, people who lived in Oxfordshire or Shropshire. Yet his
continued survival against the Vikings depended on men and money from the
counties outside Wessex. Somehow he had to retain political control of territory
that was not his. He did this by appealing to a shared sense of Englishness,
conveyed by the language. Alfred quite consciously used the English language
as a means of creating a sense of national identity.
Without Alfred the Great the history of the English language might
have been quite different. He set about restoring his kingdom to its former
greatness. He began rebuilding the monasteries and the schools. It was his
inspiration to use English, not Latin, as the basis for the education of
his people. At the age of nearly forty, amid what he called the 'various
and manifold cares of his kingdom', he learnt Latin so that he could translate
(or arrange for the translation of) various key texts, notably Bede's Historia
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (History of the English Church and People).
Alfred describes his English‑language campaign in a famous preface:
Therefore it seems better
to me ... that we should also translate certain books which are most necessary
fur all men to know, into the language that we can all understand, and also
arrange it ... so that all the youth of free men now among the English people.
. are able to read English writing as well.
There is one story (recorded by his biographer, Bishop Asser) that
perhaps demonstrates more than any other Alfred's understanding of books
and language. When he was young, Asser writes, Alfred was sitting, with some
other children, at his mother's feet. She had on her lap a book written in
English, and the boy was struck by the beauty of the decorated initial on
the first page. As the story goes, his mother said that she would give the
book to whoever could learn the book and repeat it to her. So Alfred went
away, learnt the book, returned to his mother, repeated the text, and won
the prize. Not only does the story convey ‑ as it was designed to do ‑ the
future king's drive and tenacity; it also reveals his belief in the importance
of culture. Alfred understood that his people needed history to remind them
of their loyalties. So he instituted a chronicle, a record of current events,
unique in Europe. The saviour of the English language, he was also the founder
of English prose. No other English monarch is remembered as Great'.
After Alfred, the Danes and the Saxons lived alongside each other
for generations, more or less at peace. Because both their languages had
the same Germanic roots, the language frontier broke down and a kind of natural
pidginization took place that gradually simplified the structure of Old English.
Professor Tom Shippey, who has made a close study of the mingling of Saxon
and Viking culture, vividly explains the process:
Consider what happens when somebody
who speaks, shall we say, good Old English from the south of the country
runs into somebody from the north‑east who speaks good Old Norse. They can
no doubt communicate with each other, but the complications in both languages
are going to get lost. So if the Anglo‑Saxon from the South wants to say
(in good Old English) 'I'll sell you the horse that pulls my cart,' he says:
'Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn.'
Now the old Norseman if he
had to say this ‑ would say: 'Ek mun selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine.'
So, roughly speaking, they understand
each other. One says 'waegn' and the other says 'vagn'. One says 'hors' and
'draegeth'; the other says 'hros' and 'dregr', but broadly they are communicating.
They understand the main words. What they don't understand are the grammatical
parts of the sentence. For instance, the man speaking good Old English says
for one horse 'that hors' but for two horses he says 'tha hors'. Now the
Old Norse speaker understands the word horse all right, but he's not sure
if it means one or two because in Old English you say 'one horse', 'two horse'.
There is no difference between the two words for horse. The difference is
conveyed in the word for 'the' and the old Norseman might not understand this
because his word for 'the' doesn't behave like that. So: are you trying to
sell me one horse or are you trying to sell me two horses? If you get enough
situations like that there is a strong drive towards simplifying the language.
Before the arrival of the Danes, Old English, like most European
languages at that time, was a strongly inflected language. Common words like 'king' or 'stone' relied on word‑endings
to convey a meaning for which we now use prepositions like 'to', 'with',
and 'from'. In Old English, 'the king' is se cyning, 'to the king'
is thaem cyninge. In Old English, they said one stan (stone),
two stanas (stones). The simplification of English by the Danes gradually
helped to eliminate these word‑endings, as Tom Shippey explains:
Nowadays we say the same
thing for all the plurals. We say, stone, stones and king, kings. The language
became simplified because these complications become very difficult to keep
going when you have to speak to someone who does not have a total grasp of
it, and perhaps especially difficult if you're talking to someone who has
a 90 per cent grasp of it. The vital 10 per cent is just enough difficulty
to give the wrong impression. It's very much the situation you have now between
the Danes and the Swedes. They think they can understand each other; they
say they can understand each other. But they go away from the same conversation
with different opinions about what's actually been agreed.
A little church in Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, tells the story of
the way the Vikings almost won the war and how they lost the peace. In the
porch is a sundial. Lovingly chiselled into the stone is the resoundingly
Viking name of the man who made it: Orm Gamalsson. But on closer inspection
the inscription turns out to be worked in Old English, not Old Norse. Barely
one hundred years after his people had invaded Britain, Orm Gamalsson is
writing (and presumably thinking) in English. Evidence of the way Saxon and
Dane lived alongside each other is in the place‑names that survive to this
day. Saxon place‑names are easy to spot. Places, like Clapham, ending in
ham (meaning a settlement), ing (as in Worthing), stowe
(as in Hawkstowe), sted (as in Oxsted), and ton (as in Brighton)
are all likely to be of Saxon origin. Viking place‑names have similarly characteristic
endings. Anywhere ending in by (meaning originally a farm, then a
village) is almost certainly of Danish origin, as in Grimsby or Derby.
Another Viking place‑name ending is wick as in Swainswick, Keswick,
and Chiswick. Thorpe (Danish) and thwaite (Norwegian) are also
common Viking names, as is toft (meaning a plot of land), and scale
(a temporary hut or shelter).
The place‑names along a stretch of the Lincolnshire coast give
an indication of the way in which Saxon and Dane co‑existed, and how the
Danes had to work hard to find land for themselves. Lincolnshire is flat
and marshy and liable to flooding from the sea. The Anglo‑Saxons lived inland
in places like Covenham and Alvingham. But less than five miles
away, Danes lived in North Thoresby. Towards the coast itself, having
established a sea‑dyke to drain the marshland and make the land workable,
Danish settlements were established in Grainthorpe and Skidbrooke.
(Evidence from a study of the type of land settled indicates that the incoming
Danes often left the English undisturbed and settled on the less good, still‑empty
land.) The best hint of the mixing of Saxon and Dane comes from a place‑name
like Melton. Melton was almost certainly Middletoun in Old
English. When the Vikings came they would have recognized the meaning of the
name, but replaced the Old English middle with the Scandinavian meddle,
giving Meddleton, and finally Melton.
The impact of Old Norse on the English language is hard to evaluate
with much accuracy, precisely because the two languages were so similar.
Nine hundred words ‑ for example, get, bit, leg, low, root, skin, same,
want, and wrong ‑ are certainly of Scandinavian origin and typically
plain‑syllabled. Words beginning with sk, like sky and skein,
are Norse. There are probably hundreds more we cannot account for definitely,
and in the old territory of the Danelaw in northern England literally thousands
of Old Norse borrowings, words like beck (stream), laithe
(barn), and garth (yard), survive in regional use. Riding,
derived from an Old Norse word meaning 'a third part', was used to indicate
the division of an English county, Yorkshire, until recently. Riding
is also used in Canada to describe a parliamentary constituency. There is
another influence derived from these northern invaders we shall look at later:
the beginnings of Scots English.
In many cases the old Norse borrowings stood alongside their English
equivalents. The Norse skirt originally meant the same as the English
shirt. The Norse deyja (to die) joined its Anglo‑Saxon synonym,
the English steorfa (which ends up in the dictionaries as starve).
You can rear (English) or raise (Norse) a child. Other synonyms
or near‑synonyms include: wish and want, craft and skill,
hide and skin. Thanks to the Danes, the language was given
another dimension, more light and shade, and more variety.
The fusion of Saxon and Viking is epitomized in Beowulf a
poem of some 3,000 lines, the greatest single work of Old English literature,
as intricate and subtle as the illuminated manuscripts painted at the same
time. It reveals a reflective and ruminative temper of mind, obsessed with
the transience of life, with heroism, and with the keeping of dignity in
the face of defeat. These lines are typical of the mood of the poem:
| There's no joy from harp‑play,
gleewood's gladness, no good hawk, swings through the hall now, no swift horse tramps at threshold: the threat came: falling has felled a flowering kingdom. |
gomen gleobeames geond sael swingeth burhstede beateth fela feorhcynna |
Naes hearpan wyn Naene god hafoc ne se swifta mearh Bealocwealm hafath forth onsendet! |
Other surviving poems from this time emphasize the character of
the Anglo‑Saxon experience. The poets write of the cruel sea, ruined cities,
the life of the minstrel, and of war and exile. The pinnacle of the Vikings'
achievement and of Danish integration into English society ‑ was marked around
the year AD 1000, when Cnut, king of Denmark (known to legend as wise King
Canute), inherited the English throne, conquered Norway, and ruled over most
of the Scandinavian world. From then on their story is one of rapid decline.
In 1066 the English language once again showed an astonishing adaptability
in surviving another major linguistic collision following the landing of
the Norman French at Hastings. It was the limpid English prose of The
Anglo‑Saxon Chronicle that recorded this event, in a few doom‑laden paragraphs:
Then Count William came
from Normandy to Pevensey on Michaelmas Eve (28 September), and as soon as
they were able to move they built a castle at Hastings. King Harold was informed
of this and he assembled a large army and came against him at the hoary apple‑tree,
and William came against him by surprise before his army was drawn up in
battle array. But the king nevertheless fought hard against him, with the
men who were willing to support him, and there were heavy casualties on both
sides. Then King Harold was killed and Earl Leofwine his brother, and Earl
Gyrth his brother, and many good men, and the French remained masters of
the field...
The Norman victory at Hastings
changed the face of English for ever. Harold
was the last English‑speaking king for nearly three hundred years. It was,
in the words of one scholar, 'an event which had a greater effect on the
English language than any other in the course of its history'. In the short
run it must have seemed like a disaster for the English. The Normans seized
control of their new territory with systematic rigour. Norman castles, built
by English workmen, were garrisoned by Norman soldiers and used as strong
points to hold down the countryside. The English royal family and Harold's
court had been destroyed in battle. William established his own regime, rewarding those
who had supported his expedition across the Channel. The English poet Robert
of Brunne wrote:
To French and Normans, for their
great labour,
To Flemings and Picards, that
were with him in battle,
He gave lands betimes, of which
their successors
Hold yet the seizin, with full
great honour.
William also purged the English church: Norman bishops and abbots
gradually took over in the cathedrals and monasteries. For several generations
after the Conquest all important positions in the country were dominated
by French‑speaking Normans.
William's coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066,
an act of triumph, symbolized the condition of England for the next two hundred
years. He was crowned in a ceremony that used both English and Latin. He
himself spoke the French of Normandy and though he tried to learn English
at the age of forty‑three he was too busy to keep it up. So from 1066 there
were three languages in play and the overwhelming majority of English people
experienced the humiliations of a linguistic apartheid: religion, law, science,
literature were all conducted in languages other than English, as words like
felony, penury, attorney, bailiff and nobility testify.
A twelfth‑century miracle story expresses the bitter resentment
the English felt. A friend of St Wulfric of Haselbury, a certain Brother
William, laid hands on a dumb man who had been brought to him. At once the
man could speak both English and French. The local parish priest, Brichtric,
complained that this was unfair. He had served the church faithfully for
many years and yet Brother William had made it possible for a total stranger
to speak two languages while he, Brichtric, had to remain dumb in the presence
of his bishop. Though he was a priest, Brichtric knew little or no Latin,
and no French.
Going by the written record alone, the supremacy of Norman French
and Latin seems total. In 1154, the English monks who wrote The Anglo‑Saxon
Chronicle abandoned their work for ever. A great silence seems to descend
on English writing. In court, church, and government circles, French was
established as the smart and Latin as the professional language. There is,
for instance, the story of Bishop William of Ely, Chancellor of England during
the reign of Richard the Lionheart (Coeur de Lion). Disgraced politically,
the bishop tried to escape from England in 1191 disguised as a woman and
carrying under his arm some cloth for sale. He reached Dover safely but was
discovered when he was asked by an English woman what he would charge for
an ell of cloth. He could not reply because he knew no English ‑ and it was
inconceivable that his low‑born captors could speak French.
The Norman kings were often totally ignorant of English, although
Henry I, who had an English wife, was an exception and could speak some English.
No doubt in upper‑class circles it was the fashionable thing to speak French.
To this day the use of French words in conversation is thought to show sophistication,
or savoir‑faire. The situation is summarized by the historian known
as Robert of Gloucester:
For but a man know French
men count of him little.
But low men hold to English
and to their own speech yet.
I think there are in all the
world no countries
That don't hold to their own
speech but England alone.
Though French had the social and cultural prestige, Latin remained
the principal language of religion and learning. The English vernacular survived
as the common speech, obviously a matter of pride for Robert of Gloucester.
The mingling of these three powerful traditions can be seen in the case of
a word like kingly. The Anglo‑Saxons had only one word to express
this concept, which, with typical simplicity, they made up from the word
king. After the Normans, three synonyms enter the language: royal, regal,
and sovereign. The capacity to express three or four different shades
of meaning and to make fine distinctions is one of the hallmarks of the language
after the Conquest, as word groups such as rise‑mount‑ascend, ask‑question‑interrogate,
or time‑age‑epoch suggest.
Yet the use of French in England was probably natural to only an
elite of churchmen and magnates. The continuity of the English language in
the mouths of the mass of ordinary people was never in doubt. Why did English
survive? Why was it not absorbed into the dominant Norman tongue? There are
three reasons. First and most obvious: the pre‑Conquest Old English vernacular,
both written and spoken, was simply too well established, too vigorous, and,
thanks to its fusion with the Scandinavian languages, too hardy to be obliterated.
It is one thing for the written record to become Latin and French (writing
was the skilled monopoly of church‑educated clerks), but it would have needed
many centuries of French rule to eradicate it as the popular speech of ordinary
people. The English speakers had an overwhelming demographic advantage. Pragmatically,
it is obvious that the English were not going to stop speaking English because
they had been conquered by a foreigner.
Second, English survived because
almost immediately the Normans began to intermarry with those they had conquered.
Of course, in the first generation after the Conquest, there were bound to
be deep divisions within society. There is a document dating from around
1100 addressed to 'all his faithful people, both French and English, in Herefordshire'
from Henry I. But this did not last. Barely one hundred years after the invasion,
a chronicler wrote that 'The two nations have become so mixed that it is
scarcely possible today, speaking of free men, to tell who is English and
who is of Norman race.' One can imagine the situation of a minor Norman knight
living in a small manor in the English countryside surrounded by English
peasants, served in the house by English maids, his estates managed by an
English steward, and his children playing with English children. He would
have to pick up some English to survive, and to quell the natural resentment
of his subjects. There is plenty of evidence of the peaceful co‑existence
of Norman overlords and English subjects. There were French towns alongside
the English at Norwich and Nottingham. Southampton still has a French Street,
one of its principal thoroughfares in the Middle Ages. Petty France in London
is known to anyone who has had to visit the Passport Office.
The great historian Ordericus Vitalis provides good evidence of
the decline of French in educated society, both courtly and clerical. The
son of a Norman knight and an English mother, Ordericus was born less than
a decade after the Conquest near Shrewsbury and was taught Latin by a local
priest. At the age of ten he was sent to continue his education in a monastery
in Normandy. There, he writes (in Latin, of course), 'Like Joseph in Egypt,
I heard a language which I did not know.' In other words, he knew no French.
Third, and perhaps most important,
in 1204, thanks to the military impetuosity of King John, the Anglo‑Normans
lost control of their French territory across the Channel. Many of the Norman
nobility, who had held lands in both countries and divided their time between
them, were forced to declare allegiance either to France or to England. Simon
de Montfort's family separated their estates in this way: 'My brother Amaury,'
said de Montfort, 'released to me our brother's whole inheritance in England,
provided that I could secure it; in return I released to him what I had in
France.' This process of separation reached a turning‑point in 1244 when the
king of France made a decisive move, announcing that, 'As it is impossible
that any man living in my kingdom, and having possessions in England, can
competently serve two masters, he must either inseparably attach himself
to me or to the king of England.'
In the early years of the thirteenth century, long before the outbreak of hostilities with France
known as the Hundred Years War, we find English making a comeback at both
the written and the spoken level. Church sermons, prayers, and carols especially
are expressed in English. The first known appearance of an English word in
a Latin document occurs in an account of a court case brought by Henry III
against some of his citizens. The clerk, trained in Latin, who recorded the
proceedings found himself lost for the right Latin word to describe the king's
suit. Instead, we find him writing in English that it is nameless
(or, as we should say, 'pointless'). More and more records were now kept
in English; more and more upper‑class Englishmen were keeping up their French
only for the sake of appearances. The great silence that had apparently fallen
over the written language from 1066 to 1200 began to be broken, at first
with a few simple messages and then with a flood of documents.
English writings like The Owl and the Nightingale and the
Ancrene Riwle are probably the tip of an iceberg of lost manuscripts:
and of course church sermons and hymns would undoubtedly have been given
in English. Anti‑French feeling ‑ complaints that London is full of foreigners
‑ was greatly provoked during the reign of Henry III, which ended in 1272.
Henry was wholly French and surrounded himself with French favourites. The
confused situation is exemplified by the Barons' revolt of Simon de Montfort
in the middle of the century ‑ for all his ancestry, it was distinctly anti‑French
in spirit. At the same time, the English bishop Grosseteste (obviously of
Norman blood) denounced Henry's French courtly circle as 'not merely foreigners;
they are the worst enemies of England. They strive to tear the fleece and
do not even know the faces of the sheep; they do not understand the English
tongue ...'
At the end of the thirteenth century, Edward
I (1272‑1307), who was very conscious of his Englishness, whipped up patriotic
feeling against the king of France, declaring that it was 'his detestable
purpose, which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue'. The growing power
and spread of the vernacular is expressed by a contemporary poet who wrote:
Common men know no French
Among a hundred scarcely one
Even among the educated classes it seems clear that French had
become an acquired, not a natural, language. There is a little textbook
dating from the mid‑thirteenth century written by a knight known as Walter
of Bibbesworth. It was designed to teach English‑speaking children how to
learn French, 'which every gentleman ought to know'. (Throughout Europe,
French was the language of chivalry, just as in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries it was the language of diplomacy.) Two hundred years after the
Norman Conquest, the descendants of William's knights were almost certainly
acquiring French in the schoolroom, not the cradle.
English had now become much more self‑assertive. The new note of
nationalistic pride in the language is sounded in the introduction to a long
biblical poem called Cursor Mundi: 'This book is translated into English
for the love of the English people, English people of England, and for the
common man to understand . . .' As English‑language consciousness grew, churches
and universities tried to stop the decline of French. For instance, the foundation
statutes of Oriel and The Queen's College (1326 and 1340) at Oxford University
required that the undergraduates should converse in French and Latin. At
Merton things were obviously going to the dogs. There was a report that the
Fellows spoke English at High Table and wore 'dishonest shoes'. The battle
for French was a losing one, partly because English French was certainly
not a prestige dialect, a point that Chaucer makes with his usual irony when
he writes about the Prioress:
And Frenssh she spak ful faire
and fetisly,
After the scole of Stratford
atte Bowe,
For Frenssh of Parys was to
hir unknowe.
The Hundred Years War with France (1337‑1454) provided a major impetus to speak English, not French.
At the same time, the outbreak of the mysterious disease known as 'The Black
Death', by making labour scarce, improved and accelerated the rise in status
of the English working man (a process that culminated in the Peasants Revolt
of 1381). It caused so many deaths in the monasteries and churches that a
new generation of semi‑educated, non‑French and Latin speakers took over
as abbots and prioresses. After the plague, students at school began to construe
their French and Latin lessons in English not French, to the obvious detriment
of French. In 1325, the chronicler William of Nassyngton wrote:
Latin can no one speak, I trow,
But those who it from school
do know;
And some know French, but no
Latin
Who're used to Court and dwell
therein,
And some use Latin, though
in part,
Who if known have not the art,
And some can understand English
That neither Latin knew, nor
French
But simple or learned, old
or young
All understand the English tongue.
English now appears at every
level of society. In 1356, the mayor and aldermen of London ordered that
court proceedings there be heard in English; in 1362, the Chancellor opened
Parliament (but cf. Henry V, 1422 (page 16)) in English. During Wat Tyler's
rebellion in 1381, Richard II spoke to the peasants in English. In the last
year of the century the proceedings for the deposition of Richard II (together
with the document by which he renounced the throne) were in English. Henry
IV's speeches claiming the throne and later accepting it were also in English.
The mother tongue had survived.
But English had changed; it had become the form known to scholars
as Middle
English, a term devised in the nineteenth century to describe the English
language from AD 1150 to 1500. The distinction ‑ given the collapse of Old
English writing ‑ is partly artificial. Much of what is called Middle English
is no more than a record in writing of what had already happened to
spoken Old English. Thus, while spoken Old English had almost
certainly lost most of its inflections by the time of the Norman Conquest,
it is not until written Middle English that the changes show up in
the documents. Perhaps the most vital simplification, now fully established,
was the loss of Old English word endings, which were replaced by prepositions,
words like by, with, and from.
An example of what happened in the transition from Old English
to Middle English is shown in the story of the letter y. In Old English,
y represented, in some cases, the sound which French scribes wrote
as u: a short vowel. So Old English mycel became Middle English
muchel, which ends up as Modern English much. But when y
stood for a long vowel the long u was written by the French scribes
as ui. So the Old English fyr, becomes the Middle English fuir,
and the modern fire. To make the matter more complicated, the original
vowel sound, short or long, represented by the Old English y, sounded
different in different parts of the country. In the North and East down to
the East Midlands as far as London, the short vowel sound became roughly
like that represented by modern English i, as in kin. In Kent
and parts of East Anglia it became the sound represented by e, as
in merry. In the West‑Country, it became the sound now represented
by oo as in mood, but in those days spelt u. The same
word at the same period in Middle English was therefore spelt differently
in different parts of the country. Old English for 'kin', cyn, for
example, could be kyn, ken, or kun. In the case of byrgen
(which had Middle English variants birien, burien, berien) Modern
English has kept the western spelling, bury, while using the Kentish
pronunciation, berry, while busy reflects the western spelling
but is pronounced as the London/East Midlands 'bizzy'. (examples of vowel
change "y")
So what had happened to the language map of England? The short
answer is that it had not changed much from Anglo‑Saxon times, though with
the development of written English it had developed strong local forms, written
and spoken. For instance, the author of Cursor Mundi notes that he
found the story of the Assumption of Our Lady in southern English and translated
it for 'northern people who can read no other English'. And even Chaucer
launches Troilus and Criseyde with his famous 'Go, litel book', adding
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng
of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite
the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute
of tonge.
Spoken English differed from county to county as it does in rural
districts to this day. The five main speech areas ‑ Northern, West and East
Midlands, Southern and Kentish ‑ are strikingly similar to contemporary English
speech areas. Within the East Midlands, one small nucleus of power, trade
and learning ‑ the triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, and London ‑ shared the
same kind of English, which may be said to have become the basis for Standard
English in the twentieth century.
Stanley Ellis, an authority on English speech varieties, has devoted
his life to studying the bizarre nuances and definitions of English speech.
He takes his tape‑recorder into the English countryside and by a process
of gentle inquiry discovers local variations in usage, of both vocabulary
and accent. In this passage, he is trying to establish the local Yorkshire
for a watercourse. His informant speaks broad Yorkshire, pronouncing 'no'
as nae, 'nude' as noody and 'leap' as lope.
Stanley Ellis: You've been
in farming all your life. Farming's altered a lot, hasn't it?
Informant: Oh, my God, there's
no comparison to when I started.
Stanley Ellis: In the old days,
how did you get your drainage to the fields? The gutters would be drains,
and the gutters would then run out into the . .
Informant: The beck.
Stanley Ellis: Ah yes. The beck.
Now what's the difference between a beck and a gutter?
Informant: Why of course the
beck's considerably wider than th' gutter We used to bathe in th' beck you
know. Oh aye. Went hollocking down here and it was nowt to be nude and leap
into th' water.
Not only does Ellis establish the distinction between beck
and 'gutter', and hollocking for 'galloping', he also collects a piece
of authentic folk practice ‑ bathing in the river. In another part of the
country, in Kent for example, the conversation would have been different.
David North is one of Ellis's pupils. His conversation with a local farmer
goes as follows:
David North: What do you
call a stretch of water at the edge of a field that you drain the field with?
Informant: A stretch of water?
A pond?
North: Well, the sort of thing
along the hedge to drain ‑
Informant: Oh, the ditch, the
dyke ‑ well, some people call it dyke. My old people called it ditch.
And so on. The one thing missing on the page of print, of course,
is the sound. In the first extract, the Yorkshireman is hard for most people
to understand; in the second, the man from Kent is easier, even though he
says doik for 'dyke' and oi for 'I'. This is simply because
he is geographically closer to the Standard English dialect of London. To
put it another way, if Edinburgh not London were the capital of the British
Isles, Standard English would sound like Scottish English. There is nothing
special about Standard English except that it happens to be the speech of
the capital, the prestige English.
The career and achievement of one man, Geoffrey
Chaucer (1340‑1400), exemplifies the triumph of London English. By making
a conscious choice to write in English, he symbolizes the rebirth of English
as a national language. Born in 1340 of a provincial middle‑class family
in the wine trade, he was, in the custom of the time, educated as a squire
in a noble household, later joining the king's retinue. He began his writing
life as a translator and imitator. His later work offers some clues to the
life of the poet. In The Parlement of Fowles he tells how he reads
in bed at night because he cannot sleep. From 1370 to 1391, Chaucer was busy
on the king's business at home and abroad. He is recorded negotiating a trade
agreement in Genoa, and on a diplomatic mission to Milan, from which he acquired
a taste for Italian poetry. Petrarch was still alive in Florence and Boccaccio
was lecturing on Dante, though there is no way of knowing if Chaucer met
either of them. During these years he composed much of his best work: The
House of Fame, The Parlement of Fowles, Troilus and Criseyde, and translated
the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.
It is likely that it was around this time that he began to work
on his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, poems which he would either
read aloud in the traditional manner or, as was becoming the practice, pass
around for reading. In the final years of his life, with England divided
by fierce political rivalries, Chaucer's career at court faltered. The last
reference to him comes in December 1399, when he took a lease on a house in
the garden of Westminster Abbey. He died on 25 October 1400 and was buried
in the Abbey.
Recognized as a great poet in his lifetime, in both France and
England ('noble Geffrey Chaucier', as a French poet called him), he is one
of those writers of genius on whom English has always depended for its important
transformations. He took as his subjects all classes of men and women: the
Knight, the Prioress, and the famous Wife of Bath. Chaucer was alive to the
energy and potential of the language of everyday speech. He pokes fun at
Yorkshire speech, he dazzles the reader with word‑play, and he mocks the
pretensions of people who claim to know French and Latin. He writes of the
Summoner:
Wel loved he garleek, oynons,
and eek lekes,
And for to drynken strong wyn,
reed as blood;
Thanne wolde he speke and crie
as he were wood.
And when that he wel drunken
hadde the wyn,
Than wolde he speke nor word
but Latyn.
Of the Friar, Hubert, he says:
Somewhat he lisped, for his
wantownesse,
To make his English sweete upon
his tonge;
Chaucer benefited enormously from the preceding three hundred years
of language evolution. This can be shown
in one line, the words of Criseyde, spoken to her knight, Troilus:
Welcome, my knyght, my pees,
my suffisance
Welcome, my knyght are all
original English words, though knyght, from the Old English cniht,
'boy', has, under French social and military influence, come to connote a
vast structure of concepts and feelings. Peace is one of the earliest
words recorded as borrowed from French after the Conquest, replacing English
grith. Suffisance, a grand, rather abstract word for 'satisfaction'
is another French borrowing, from an obviously Latin source. The richness
of Middle English, Latinized and Frenchified by Christianity and Conquest,
inspires the opening lines of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,
which many have quoted before and which we must quote again:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures
soote
The droghte of March hath perced
to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich
licour
Of which vertu engendred is
the flour
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete
breeth
Inspired hath in every holt
and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the
yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours
yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with
open eye
(So priketh hem nature in hir
corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon
on pilgrimages .
It was Dryden (1631‑1700), writing in the seventeenth century,
who gave most eloquent expression to the debt the English language owes to
its first major poet:
He must have been a Man of
a most wonderful comprehensive Nature, because, as it has been truly observed
of him, he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the
various Manners and Humours (as we now call them) of the whole English
Nation, in his Age ... The Matter and Manner of their Tales, and of their
telling, are so suited to their different Educations, Humours, and Callings,
that each of them would he improper in any other mouth ... 'Tis sufficient
to say, according to the Proverb, that here is God's plenty.
Chaucer's time also saw the emergence of English surnames, family
names. In Anglo‑Saxon peasant society it was enough for a man to be identified
as Egbert or Heorogar. Later, a second stage would produce the 'son of' prefix
or suffix ‑ Johnson, Thomson, Jobson. As English society became more sophisticated,
Christian or first names were not enough. People began to be identified by
where they lived, hence Brooks, Rivers, Hill, and Dale. Or
more specifically: Washington, Lincoln, or Cleveland. The next
most common form of identification was occupation: Driver, Butcher, Hunter,
Glover, Sadler, Miller, Cooper, Weaver, Porter, Carpenter, Mason, Thatcher,
Salter, Waxman, Barber, Bowman, Priest, Abbot, Piper, Harper, Constable.
Then there were continental names of people/ families from abroad: Fleming,
French, Holland. The Welsh contributed Evans (a version of Johns),
Owens, and Rhys (Reece). The Welsh Ll underwent phonetic
assimilation, giving us both Floyd and Lloyd. Shakespeare's
Captain Fluellen was the English version of Llewellyn. In Scotland,
Mc or Mac is well known as son of, a prefix attached to occupations
as in the South: McPherson means 'son of the parson'. A few names
go back into Scottish mythology. McCormack means 'son of Chariot‑Lad' and
McRory means 'son of Red‑King'. The arrival of the Norman French also
introduced names like Fitzjohn, Gascoygne, Francis, Lorraine, Baillie,
Gerard, Gerald, Raymond, and Vernon. Geoffrey Chaucer himself
had a French first name and a half‑French surname. Chaucer (from the Old
French chaustier, shoemaker) came from his grandfather's residence
in Cordwainer (Leatherworker) Street.
Chaucer wrote in English, but the language of government was still
officially French. Yet only seventeen years after the poet's death, Henry
V became the first English king since Harold to use English in his official
documents, including his will. In the summer of 1415, Henry crossed the Channel
to fight the French. In the first letter he dictated on French soil he chose,
symbolically, not to write in the language of his enemies. This national
statement indicates a turning‑point, as decisive in its own way as Alfred's
use of English in the ninth century. Henry's predecessor, Edward III, could
only swear in English; now it was the official language of English kings.
Henry V's example clearly made an impression on his people. There
is a resolution made by the London brewers, dating from the year of Henry's
death, 1422, which adopts English by decree:
Whereas our mother tongue,
to wit, the English tongue, hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged
and adorned; for that our most excellent lord king Henry the Fifth hath,
in his letters missive, and divers affairs touching his own person, more
willingly chosen to declare the secrets of his will [in it]; and for the better
understanding of his people, hath, with a diligent mind, procured the common
idiom (setting aside others) to be commended by the exercise of writing; and
there are many of our craft of brewers who have the knowledge of writing and
reading in the said English idiom, but in others, to wit, the Latin and French,
before these times used, they do not in any wise understand; for which causes,
with many others, it being considered how that the greater part of the lords
and trusty commons have begun to make their matters to be noted down in our
mother tongue, so we also in our craft, following in some manner their steps,
have decreed in future to commit to memory the needful things which concern
us.
The importance of this statement is that the brewers have decided
to adopt English writing. The next step was for written English to
be expressed in printed form and for this crucial development we must look
at the life and work of William Caxton, as important for the language in
his own way as Geoffrey Chaucer, whose work he printed.
William Caxton (ca 1422‑1491
(cf. Gutenberg: ca 1395‑1468)) 'was born and learned mine English in Kent
in the Weeld [Weald] where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English
as is in any place of England'. He bad an eventful life as a merchant and
diplomat, learned the art of printing on the Continent and then, in retirement,
introduced the press into England around the year 1476, setting up his press
within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. He was an attractive, original,
and thoroughly English character: a man of gusto and humour, of business
acumen and pronounced political loyalties. He was perhaps the first editor‑publisher,
printing the works of Chaucer, and other poets like Gower, Lydgate, and Malory;
but he also translated bestsellers from France and Burgundy, and was himself
a compulsive writer who obviously delighted in printing his own works. For
the history of English spelling, Caxton's decision to reproduce the English
of London and the South‑East is crucial. Caxton and his successors gave a
special currency to London English.
Caxton's decision was not as simple as it would seem in retrospect.
There were several standards with rival
claims. It was not easy for a writer and printer in the fifteenth century
to choose a version of English that would find favour with all readers. In
one of his prefaces, Caxton himself describes some of the difficulties he
encountered when he came to print English for the first time. He was sitting
in this study, he says, and without any new work to hand, picked up a book
that had recently been translated from Latin into French, a paraphrase of
Virgil's Aeneid. Then, says Caxton, he 'concluded to translate it
into English, and forthwith took a pen and ink, and wrote a page or two'.
But when he came to read through what he had done, he found he had used so
many 'strange terms' he was afraid that he would be accused of translating
in a way that 'could not be understood by common people'. Then he describes
how he consulted 'an old book' to improve his translation but found 'the
English so rude and broad that I could not well understand it'. He compared
this with some Old English, which he found 'more like to Dutch than English'.
Next there were the problems of regional variation: 'Common English that
is spoken in one shire varies from another.' He tells a story, expressed
here with all the wonderful idiosyncrasy of Middle English spelling and syntax:
In so moche that in my
dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse, for to
have sayled over the see into zelande, and for lacke of wynde, thei taryed
atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named
Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in‑to an hows and axed for mete; and specyally he
axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe.
And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde
have hadde egges, and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother
sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym
wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? Certaynly
it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage.
For in these days every man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre, wyll
utter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes that fewe
men shall understonde theym. And som honest and grete clerkes have ben wyth
me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous terms that I coude fynde. And
thus bytwene playn, rude, & curyous, I stande abasshed. But in my judgemente
the comyn terms that be dayli used ben lyghter to be understonde than the
olde and auncyent englysshe. And for as moche as this present booke is not
for a rude uplondysshe man to laboure therin, ne rede it, but onely for a
clerke & a noble gentylman that feleth and understondeth in faytes of
armes, in love, & in noble chyvalrye, therfor in a meane bytwene bothe
I have reduced & translated this sayd booke in to our englysshe, not
ouer rude ne curyous, but in suche termes as shall be understanden, by goddys
grace, accordynge to my copye.
When Caxton settled for the idiosyncrasies of the English he heard
in the streets of London ‑ 'right', for instance, reflects the fifteenth‑century
pronunciation 'richt' (ch pronounced as in loch) ‑ he (and
printers like him) helped to fix the language on the page before its writers
and teachers had reached a consensus. It is to this that English owes some
of its chaotic and exasperating spelling conventions.
The printing press, which made the spread of learning and knowledge
so much easier, was a communication revolution, the cornerstone of the European
Renaissance, that introduced a torrent of Latin words into the language.
Fifteenth‑century English poetry is over‑burdened with what one critic called
'half‑chewed Latin'. The Scottish poet Dunbar was similarly afflicted:
Hale sterne superne! Hale, in eterne
In God's sight to schyne!
Lucerne in derne, for to discerne
Be glory and grace devyne;
Hodiern, modern, sempitern
...
This sort of writing provoked Bishop Reginald Pecock to make what
is, perhaps, the first proposal (in a long tradition of such proposals) to
'purify' the English language. Latinate borrowings, he argued, should be purged.
Instead of impenetrable, he proposed ungothroughsome; instead
of inconceivable, he suggested not‑to‑be‑thought‑upon‑able.
Pecock was not taken seriously; by the eighteenth century, however, such suggestions
were given more weight.
The growing prestige and supremacy of the London standard is reflected in the fact that Mak, the sheep‑stealer
in one of the early miracle plays, attempts to impose upon the Yorkshire shepherds
by masquerading as a person of some importance and affects a 'Southern tooth'.
The vitality, if not the sophistication, of English culture is clear from
the other plays of the fifteenth century: Mankind, for instance, one
of the hits of its time, which was written around 1470, was designed for
a company of strolling players, who would have been professionals. The script
includes the taking of a collection during the performance, the first recorded
instance of commercial acting. It has some crowd‑pulling bawdiness:
It is wretyn [written] with
a coIl [coal], it is wretyn with a coIl,
He that schitith with his hoyll
[hole], he that schitith with his hoyll,
But [unless] he wippe his ars
clene, but he wippe his ars clene,
On his breche [breeches] it
shall be sen, on his breche it shall be sen ...
The play would have been performed in a church porch or in an inn‑yard,
and because the play requires only six actors the company could be highly
mobile. Such troupes became enormously popular throughout Europe in the sixteenth
century. Eventually the best of the English groups settled in London and
built the original open‑air theatres. The first appeared in 1576, when Shakespeare
would have been twelve years old. The players in Mankind were the
ancestors of the King's Men and the Elizabethan dramatic tradition. Hamlet's
excitement at the news that the Players are coming to Elsinore gives us some
idea of the enthusiasm with which such troupes were greeted.
Mankind tells the story
of a hard‑working peasant. Under the spell of the devil Titivillus and the
Seven Deadly Sins, Mankind is made to swear an oath of loyalty to Satan.
Then Titivillus, the forerunner of the Iago‑character in Shakespeare, prepares
to ensnare Mankind in a speech loaded with malice.
Titivillus: Goo your wey,
a dev[i]ll wey, go yowr wey all!
I blisse yow with my lifte honde
‑ foull yow befall!
A[nd] bringe yowr avantage into
this place.
(Exeunt. Manet Titivillus.)
To speke with Mankinde I will
tary here this tide,
Ande assay his goode purpose
for to sett aside.
The goode man Mercy shall no
lenger be his g[u]ide.
In the end, having been saved from suicide, the deadliest sin of
all, the peasant repents and is forgiven. The language in Mankind ‑ original,
funny, and high‑spirited ‑ is thoroughly and recognizably English. (One could,
in fact, imagine having a conversation with 'Mankind' himself in the street.)
It has emerged from the shadow of Latin and French and exploits the versatility
it has acquired during the last thousand years. The stage is now set for
the English of William Shakespeare and the Elizabethans.
from "The Story of English",
New and Revised Edition by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, William Cran,
"The International Bestseller" (London 1992, pp 46‑89)